The interest in nature, and its repeated forms, set the tone for the artistic trajectory of Liana Nigri, whose foundations were established throughout the prolific period in which she worked as a print designer in Brazil and abroad.

Pattern, difference and repetition are, therefore, the key elements in the research done during an artistic residence in Rio de Janeiro, the homeland to which the artist returns after a long period living in London and New York.

Flowers and additional organic elements since the beginning apprise the artist's textile and pictorial research, although only later they would gain the dimension and depth revealed in the work at the Despina gallery. What previously possessed essentially plastic values, ended up gaining a scientific dimension, guiding her work to new formal and conceptual directions.

Laboratory research, along with biologists, supported both artistic and scientific processes, which would come to embody a set of studies on natural, artificial, human or vegetal forms currently undertaken by Nigri. The battle between the real and the symbolic, between what is recognizable and what is not familiar, as well as what is alive and what is dead, are the touchstones in the creative process of the artist.

The bacterial colony, originally used as a biofilm to "clone" recognizable organic forms (leaves), became the raw material with which the artist develops embryonic studies that would allow her to develop a second skin, an artificial epidermis that carries marks of another life, this time a human life. Scars with physical and affective memory became study material for the creation of pieces that relate the life spectrum of the individual to the widen temporality of both, the artwork and the humanity in its collective trajectory.

In Despina exhibition space, Liana reconstructs a kind of laboratory, in which we get in touch with her instruments and work technologies, and also with both vegetable and human forms dissected by her research through the magnifying glass. From the rib of Adam (the plant) to Dandara’s scar (a transsexual friend), passing through the breast of the artist, we bounce from the beginnings of human culture - via the reinterpretation of the original myth of Adam and Eve - to the present period in which biological data no longer controls the course of nature. We are then facing a second nature, which Nigri exploits in an affective, plastic, political and scientific way.

One of the installations was developed collaboratively with Adam Golub, a residence colleague, whose lenses also point to the speculative territory of political discussion on identity, gender, and culture.